Interesting.

To direct link, click the time when the Tweet was made (from the Web client) and it will take you to the direct link for that Tweet.

Is this the message to which you're referring?

MacHeist has claimed in a tweet that this was a stunt gone horribly wrong.

That reference was specific to the New Jersey turnpike trucker using a jamming. I was too lazy to look up the reference and used a generic memory. Here's an article which contains that anecdote as well as other information about GPS jamming.

There's no secret or trick to it - you just broadcast the same way as a GPS sat (the protocol is well documented) and since the broadcast is local, it's more powerful than Satellites. People use GPS jamming devices to get out of paying tolls in the US - that's just broadcasting noise on the right channel. Spoofing is more refined - broadcasting actual offsets in the right channel. Really, military grade equipment should use some inertial tracking as well to prevent sudden-location shifts common with spoofing. But hindsight, weight limitations, etc.

The benefits of learning even small parts of another language exceed the practicality of using it as a part of your job.

I work with a great deal of people from various parts of India. Though Hindi is not learned universally in India, everyone I have spoken with has a fairly good grasp of it.

I learned from a book and from speaking to my coworkers. It's help build some friendships where none would have existed before and gave me the chance to augment my team with tremendous resources others had passed off because of a "language barrier." (There was no barrier; just because the grammatical structure is different doesn't mean you can't understand them if you want to. Some just didn't want to. C'est la vie - it worked out to my benefit.)

My grandfather was Norwegian so I started learning Norwegian Bokmal quite passively. As the years go by, I grow more interested in the country and culture. They are some amazing people! As a consequence, when some programmers came during Thanksgiving to get trained on a piece of MOSS software we wrote for Microsoft (did that just earn me a -1 Troll?) I was invited to attend. In this case, learning a language was an opportunity to network! As a benefit, I can now read and understand Danish and I can even understand great swaths of Dutch (which seems easier to compare to Norwegian than Swedish.)

Even if it is unlikely you will need a language for your job, there are other benefits. The important part is finding something to get you interested. It is much easier to learn a language if you have a connection to it in some way. Coworkers provide a great connection. A family history is another. A coworker of mine is learning Czech because his wife's family speaks it.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to start a conversation with someone you'd normally have no connection with (run into many engineers in the wild, do you?) by trying to speak to them in their language. Hell, I've had long conversations with people who I've mistaken their accent for one from a language I've spoken! It's a great common ground!

*These are my experiences. Your mileage may vary. Offer void in Texas.